"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

The Future of Linux, 14 July 1998

The Future of Linux
was set up as a panel discussion and was held at the Santa Clara Convention
Center (in the heart of Silicon Valley) on the evening of 14 July 1998. It
was hosted by Taos Mountain and the
Silicon Valley Linux Users Group (SVLUG),
and it was sponsored by them, Intel,
Red Hat, Linux Journal, and VA
Research. Apparently it was considerably more popular than Taos
expected; people stood in line between 40 and 60 minutes to register, and
the free food and free VA Research/Linux t-shirts ran out. I didn't get a
firm count, but Taos said 850 people had RSVP'd, and it appeared that at
least 700 chairs were occupied, possibly upwards of 900 or more.
(Other reports have claimed ``more than 850'' and ``more than 1000'';
apparently quite a few people chose to stand near the front rather than
sit in back.)

The panel was a distinguished group: Jeremy Allison, one of the
lead Samba developers;
Larry Augustin, founder of VA Research and member of the
Linux International (LI) Board of Directors;
Robert Hart, from Red Hat Software; Sunil Saxena, from Intel's
Unix Performance Lab; and, of course, The Man himself, Linus Torvalds.
[And while I know there are a lot of Linux fans
who like to pronounce ``Linux'' with a long `i' sound (LYE-nucks), and
despite the fact that Linus himself doesn't care how anyone else pronounces
it, he unquestionably did so with a short `i' as in ``linen''
(LINN-ucks). In Swedish he presumably still pronounces it the third
way, roughly ``LEE-nooks.'']*
It was moderated by Michael Masterson of Taos, who traded off
questioning duties with Phil Hughes, all-around hairy guy and the
publisher of Linux Journal.

The panelists were given a pair of questions ahead of time and five minutes
(per panelist) to respond to each. The evening progressed more or less as
follows:

Note that a number of other relational databases, including Computer Associates'
Ingres II, have already been ported
to Linux. And, of course, the most popular web server in the world (Apache) has run on Linux for years and
happens to be freely available as well.

* Oh yeah, and vi rules, too. Here, take two of these
and don't flame me in the morning... We all love Linux regardless of how
it's pronounced, right??
Last modified 28 July 1998 by
newt@pobox.com , you betcha.